Code Crafter

The DCI (Data, Context, Interactions) architecture is a style that proposes an interesting separation of concerns between the domain model of a system (what the system is ) and its behavior (what the system does ), normally associated with its use cases. The rationale is that, since these parts incur change at different rates, isolating them from each other results in a system that's easier to understand, evolve and maintain. In order to enact a specific use case, a specialized context instantiates the necessary data objects assigned to the needed roles to run the required "algorithm". A very common example is that of a bank transfer operation. This example has already been described in C# with the C# quasi-mixins pattern . With NRoles the code for a role lives in a single abstraction, which results in a more compelling implementation. I'll change the example a little bit, to introduce a stateful role; something that's harder to achieve with pure C#. The...

In the last months, I've been developing in my spare time a proof-of-concept post-compiler with Mono.Cecil to enable roles in C# : NRoles . Roles are high level constructs that enable better code reuse through easier composition. They are very similar to traits as described in the traits paper (pdf) . Set up NRoles is hosted on google code . You can get the latest source code with this mercurial command: hg clone https://code.google.com/p/nroles/ nroles You can also download the latest binary package from the downloads page . To set up a Visual Studio project to use NRoles, unzip the binary package (or compile from source) in a folder accessible to the project. I normally have a project root folder, with folders for the project code ( src ) and for any used libraries ( lib ). For example: src\ project files ... lib\ nroles-v0.1.2-bin\ NRoles.dll nutate.exe other NRoles binaries ... In the project, add a reference to the NRoles.dll ...